Elm Street's John Saxon Wrote an Insane Freddy Prequel in 1987

6 months ago

This year marks the 30th Anniversary of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, but it also marks the anniversary of a little piece of franchise history most fans might not know existed. On the same day that Dream Warriors hit theaters (February 27, 1987), original Nightmare on Elm Street star John Saxon registered a treatment for an Elm Street prequel entitled How the Nightmare on Elm Street All Began, which was later revised back in 2006. An online merchant that sells rare movie memorabilia recently sold this treatment, providing some interesting details about Saxon’s plans.

Bloody-Digusting discovered this treatment for sale by an eBay user called “The Movie Wizard,” with the item selling this morning for $350. While you won’t be able to purchase this rare piece of movie history anymore, the eBay listing does have a number of photos from the treatment itself, which reveals that none other than notorious killer Charles Manson figures into the story, which is set in the year 1969, when Nancy Thompson was just five years old. Here’s the official description of this treatment from “The Movie Wizard” below.

“This is an original movie Screen Treatment written by John Saxon for his idea of a movie titled, How the Nightmare on Elm Street All Began. This is Not a movie script, it is a Screen Treatment. It is dated from 1987 and is 12 pages long. There is also a revised Treatment included which is dated from 2006 and is 16 pages long. This binder is really awesome because it contains 2 different Screen Treatments that are both written by John Saxon, he is famously known for being the main character in the original Nightmare on Elm Street Film from 1984. It doesn’t get cooler than this you have the main actor writing a Treatment for his proposed prequel to the movie. There are appx. 30 pages total included in this binder. A film treatment (or simply treatment) is a piece of prose, typically the step between scene cards (index cards) and the first draft of a screenplay for a motion picture, television program, or radio play.”

While only a few pages from both the original and updated treatment were released by the eBay seller, this story would have revealed that Freddy Krueger was actually innocent of the crimes he was accused of. There are also some other interesting details. Nancy Thompson had a step-sister named Betsy (Melodie in an alternate treatment) who gets swept up in the hippie movement of the late 1960s. Saxon’s Donald Thompson takes teenage Betsy to a therapist after she returns home from a hippie commune. That therapist is “Dr. Frederick Krueger.” Also this story unfolds, Donald is also investigating the murder of a young boy who had been, “stabbed with some kind of object that produces multiple wounds simultaneously.

Soon Betsy Thompson is killed, and everyone thinks it’s Dr. Krueger. A group of parents on Elm Street kidnap Freddy, hoping that he will confess his crimes, but the parents end up becoming so enraged by what he tells them, that they beat him with a shovel and burn him alive. Shortly after Frederick Krueger is murdered, young Nancy Thompson soon starts seeing visions of the killer we will come to know as Freddy Krueger. After the parents of Freddy Krueger’s first supposed victims burned him alive, Detective Thompson watches the confession of a young girl, who confessed to a series of murders, including that of young Betsy, stating that there were others involved in the killings. It was all masterminded by “Charlie,” a.k.a. Charles Manson.

The updated treatment, submitted on June 6, 2006 (a.k.a. 06/06/06), sets the action a year earlier in 1968, with both treatments suggesting that the parents brought their kids to Dr. Krueger because they didn’t really love them, although the updated treatment offers yet another crazy twist, that Thompson himself has become a real-life incarnation of Freddy Krueger, carrying a bag into a cave which contains the “gloved razor blade claw” and the red and green sweater of Dr. Frederick Krueger. Krueger’s absence in this treatment was tied to the arrest of a commune leader named Jimmy. We reported last week that director David F. Sandberg (Annabelle: Creation) wants to reboot Freddy Krueger, although it remains unclear if that project will happen, or if he would even be interested in John Saxon’s intriguing treatment for A Nightmare on Elm Street prequel. Take a look at the photos of the treatment pages below.